![]() ![]() But by acting outside of the bounds of Victorian England’s expectations of women, Dorothea breaks out of these statuesque molds of domesticity and femininity and becomes a new, self- reliant heroine. Eliot died of kidney disease in the same year of her marriage, 1880. Lewes died in 1878 and after this Eliot married John Walter Cross, again causing controversy because Cross was 20 years younger than she was. Theresa as a motif within the novel suggests that many Victorian women are “frozen” like marble in a world controlled by patriarchal institutions. Middlemarch was published in instalments between 1871-72, and Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda, was published in 1876. Eliot’s use of Gian Bologna Bernini’s marble statue The Ecstasy of St. Making masterful use of a counter pointed plot, Eliot presents the stories of a number of denizens of a small English town on the eve of the Reform Bill of 1832. But Dorothea refuses to be passively female. There is nothing dishonorable in being a woman of loving heartbeats who sobs for unattained goodness however, the inconvenient reality is that sobbing will not achieve any practical good, and passionate, able women such as Dorothea can easily be stuck in a social structure that prohibits women’s freedom to act. ![]() The novel opens, “Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heartbeats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centering in some long-recognizable deed” (Eliot 2). Dorothea Brooke is a passionate, capable woman in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, but she is tragically portrayed as an updated version of Saint Theresa of Avila from Catholic Mythology. ![]()
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